This is a crazy cool project that links up the lighting system in a real life venue (San Francisco's venerable DNA Lounge, in this case) to the lighting system in a virtual world. As creator James Baicoianu explains:
Controlling lights in a WebXR night club using Chamsys MagicQ, a professional lighting control suite. This lets us configure a full digital twin of the real-life night club, where the light show running in the virtual world is driven by the same controller as [the real world club], and thus synced.
It's the brainchild of James Baicoianu, formerly lead engineer for the late-lamented WebXR metaverse startup called Janus VR, who tells me the system can probably work with non-WebXR worlds. As James explains to me:
"If the virtual world's scripting environments have a way to stream data from a server, yeah -- not all of them make that easy though. What I'm doing is bridging the Art-Net protocol which carries DMX-512 data from the lighting equipment to a server, and then forwarding to clients.
"So as long as you can establish some streaming connection (WebSockets or WebRTC in the WebXR case, TCP or UDP otherwise) and parse the binary data as it comes in, from there it's a matter of mapping channels to virtual object properties like color, rotation, etc."
James may one day open source the tools he's showing off here, but for now, he's using them in contract gigs for real life organizations turning to virtual events in the pandemic age. What he's created here makes it possible for a professional lighting expert to create and run a virtual world lightshow using the platform they already know well (MagicQ, in this case):
"With tools like this they can bring their existing knowledge," as he puts it. "Virtual events now feel like they're in their infancy, we have Zoom conferences or simple 3D worlds where we can give talks, but they both lack the 'show' aspect that make real world events compelling. My hope is to bring some of that over to help make online events more exciting."
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.